Personal Skill Audit and Professional Development Plan Assignment Answer

Introduction : Professional Development and Skills Audit for a Retail Management Role at Tesco

In today’s day and age, organizational and workforce efficiency are the major concern for the organization. Many investments and efforts are being taken in order to improve organization performance. Many researchers have emphasizedperformance management and skills audit. This report will discuss two significant aspects of business i.e., “Professional Skill Audit” and “Professional development plan.” The need for professional development along with its benefits will be outlined. In addition to this, a small discussion will be done regarding the expectations regarding the organization’s expectations from an aspirant for the role of Operation Managerat Tesco.Before ending the report on a high note, the report will discuss the mock interview based on the CV of the learner, wherein the strengths and weaknesses of the interview will be provided.

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P1 Examine the key benefits of on-going professional development for different stakeholders within a specific organization.

Tesco is known for its flexible and structured professional development approach that signifies every employee needs and try to fulfill them at the earliest. It is very useful from the organization’s viewpoint as it facilitates employees to determine their potential and desires. Talking about operationmanagement at Tesco, there are many duties assigned to the managers. They are required to improve and carry out non-standard works including the delivery of the products. They are the guardian of legal and standard compliance across all the subdivisions of Tesco. However, the on-going professional development is not only for them. The whole group of stakeholders can reap benefits from it (Phillips, 2012). These are discussed below:-

• Personal Growth: The main aim of the professional development programme is to improve the skill set of workers. Various new skills are developed which can help them in strengthening their position in the organization and competencies for the
• Improved Efficiency:These development programmes improve skills and employee’s conventional ways of doing a thing. Now, 
• Improve USP of Employee:With the newly added skills, employees can improve their CVs. By this way, they can market themselves and become most sought-after aspirants in their field of expertise.

P2 Investigate professional employer expectations of skills and competencies within a specific organizational context

For Tesco, employees should have some specific set of skills that is expected by the professional employer, for example, visual merchandisers need to innovative flair with the eye for design of three dimensional and the capability of turn the concepts of design into displays that are tangible that can attract the potential consumers. Sellers and buyers both need to be numerate, analytical and astute commercially while the manager of stores requires to be all-rounder such as team leader, a salesperson with the capability of simultaneously handling a lot of different tasks.  

Many of the skills are needed for every position in the retail sector and they will be learned on the job place but employee also can have achieved some of them already throughout the career or placements of work. It doesn’t matter that an employee has a graduate or non-graduate degree, Tesco and retail industry work on four type of competencies that they want in an employee. They are as mentioned below:

• Focus on business
• Personal efficiency
• Management of relationship with others
• Critical thinking(Robles, 2012)

Above declared competencies consist of a wide range of typical skills that professional employers are searching in applicants. For example-

• Better standard of numeracy and IT technology
• Excellent interpersonal skills and communication
• Efficient skills of negotiation and influencing
• Strong focus on consumers
• Skills of problem-solving and analyzing
• The capabilityto tighten the deadlines and working under pressure
• Commercial awareness
• Attention to detail
• Flexibility
• Strong skills of time-management
• Demonstrable qualities of management and leadership

M1 Evaluate the importance of on-going professional development and the associated professional skills requirements within a specific organizational context.

The on-going professional development and attached requirement of professional skills in Tesco is very essential because it provides many benefits to the profession, individuals and to the public-

• It makes sure the ability to keep the pace with the present standards of people in the retail
• It also makes sure that the maintenance and enhancement of skills and knowledge that require to provides the clients, consumers,and community, professional services.
• It looks for the employee and his knowledge are up to date and relevant. The employee is aware ofthe profession’s direction and changing the trends.
• The pace of change is possible faster than before and this is part of the environment that they live and work in.
• It helps the organization to create a helpful contribution to the team. Employees become much effective in the workplace. That will help to move into new positions in which employee can influence, lead, coach, manage and mentor the others.

D1 critically evaluate own skills and competencies to meet the employer expectation of professional skills required for employment within a specific job role.

For becoming the manager at Tesco, he requires to be a multi-skilled person should develop all needed competencies easily that are related. Management roles are about being capable of building an integral relationship with people. The manager should demonstrate the qualities of management and authority with the maintenance of the ability to play the role of a team member. Here are some competencies and skills mentioned below-

• Interpersonal skills
• Motivation and communication
• Delegation and organization
• Strategic planning and forward thinking
• Decision-making and problem solving
• Commercially awareness (Allmendinger, 2017) 

A person is a key source of information about the limitations and strengths within them but sometimes they are not able to see that accurately and clearly. Self-assessment helps the manager of Tesco to analyze the present areas and strength where development is needed further. It will help the manager in:-

• Creating the own performance review and planning
• To face a situation and undertaking a task of work
• To plan the role of public sector management
• To refresh the current skills of management (Bates, et.al., 2016)

With the self-assessment and honest responses, achieved information will be more valuable by the following points-

• This will be a snapshot of “point-in-time” of limitations and strengths. With the time, the manager will change, work nature will change and it will change the limitations and strengths too.
• Every employee is a novice at times evens those people who become experts later.
• The competencies, skills,and abilities that are required for the role of management are not complex to develop inherently. The identification as a gap in skills, competencies,and abilities can be founded by activities of targeted development.

A manager can ask too many peoples to accomplish the assessment about him and can merge the results later. This will answer a clear view about the limitations and strengths of management. This kind of feedback will be a good example and a positive initiative for self-assessment.  

P4 Review a range of learning theories and approaches used for personal and professional development processes

As the organization changes with time, it is becoming necessary for Tesco to create their own plans and manage them to make sure the employability in the complex times. For the process of personal and professional development, the organization doesn’t have to meet the targets; there are some points to reflect the learning approaches and theories, here are they-

• Keep the system’s record very simple; there can be a mind map, diary or a personal or professional development plan of Tesco.
• It can be started from the present position or goals. Everything should be printed or documented and keep them short & simple.
• The main essential thing is to have a mentor or coach who will guide the employee and will keep the employee on track.

Employees who are appraised regularly can use learning approaches such as language, communication, and professional management as the Professional development plan. Other activities which lie towards the professional updating consists of involving in committees, present in branch meetings, attending promotions and reading, writing and research etc.

A learning method that is more comfortable and more fun for making the learning easy that is Honey and Mumford learning cycle. In this, it has no exact starting point but it is necessary to complete the cycle of sustained learning. Starting from the right place in the cycle will make all the difference for the employee (Cottrell, 2015).

M2 Evaluate own skills and competencies and the most appropriate development approach to develop personal and professional skills for a specific job role

Professional and personal skills are referring to the skills which are owned by any person. Personal skills come from nature and can be produced by some activities and processes and when a person uses his personal skills for achieving the goals of organization it is called professional skills.As a manager, I understand that personal and professional skills that are important for me are communication skills, interpersonal skills, management skills, innovative approach, decision-making, analytical problem solving, proactivity, social skills and many more. Since I am an HR manager at Tesco, my department and my colleagues should bevery much concerned about the professional and personal skills of employees. In addition to this, it is my prime duty that I should be well-aware of my weaknesses. I understand that my planning and time management skills are not as good as they are supposed to be. Therefore, I need to put more focus on these weaknesses.For this, the Hr department also provides different development activities and training (Steinhouse, 2017).  

LO3

P5 Construct a development plan to enhance chosen skills and competencies within a specific work context

Management of Tesco includes learning practices, good communication skills, vitality, and decision-making. All these aspects help the organization to grow as well as employeesto create a development plan to increase the skills and competencies for. Here is the development plan of management in Tesco-

M3 Provide a detailed development plan that applies underpinning learning and development theory, in a specific work context

A development plan that represents the development and learning theory of Tesco is mentioned below-

D2 Produce a comprehensive development plan that sets out clear and achievable targets, strategies and outcomes of learning and training within a specific work context

Here is the development plan for the achievable and clear targets, learning and training outcomes and strategies of the Tesco-

P6 Undertake a job interview for a suitable service industry role

Here is the process of a job interview for the role of manager at Tesco. Here are the steps as following-

Job Description-

Job Title: Assistant manager

Job Location: Bangalore (Whitefield campus)

Job type: Full time

Salary: As per negotiation

Job Time & Date: 1^stDecember 2018

Work-

• Gain feedback from stores for the provided services by distribution team and helpdesk
• Share the survey’s daily report
• Analysis of backup reports and escalation desk on the basis of requirement

Job Requirements-

• Any graduate
• Experience of 1 year
• Good communication and leadership skills
• Good interpersonal skills (Marcusson, and Lundqvist, 2018)

There should be an unstructured interview for this job role where senior persons and high authority will be there in the interview room to ask questions to the candidates. Firstly among all the applications for the interview, there will be selected applicants who fulfill the requirement of job position then an unstructured interview process will be followed by the interviewers. However, the applicants will be questioned on the spot but there should be some pre-decided questions as well for the job role. These questions can be as follows-

• Ask about a situation where the candidate had to deal with a team member who opposed his ideas consistently and how he handled him?
• Ask about the project he managed successfully in past and what challenges he had to face while completing the project?
• How he would tell any colleague that he is not performing well?

After the interview, the skilled candidate will be select as per the discussion between interviewers of Tesco.  

P7 Review key strengths and weaknesses of an applied interview process

The interview process for the role of assistant manager at Tesco will be an unstructured interview as per the discussion of the persons who are going to take the interview. This type of interview is a conversation with the flow which is open to discuss and ask anything and that is informal. These types of interviews are conducted by higher authorities randomly of the organization who are on authoritative position. Every interview type or process has some key strengths and weaknesses of their own. So this unstructured interview process also has these strengths and weaknesses that are as follows-

Strengths-

• It provides better understanding between interviewer and candidate rather than an unstructured interview.
• It is more comfortable and flexible.
• It applies a practical method to identify the applicant.
• It is an interactive and valid method.
• It removes the gap of communication between applicant and interviewer.
• This develops a good image of the organization to the candidate about the work atmosphere.
• It gives a chance to attract the applicant towards the organization.
• It doesn’t have fixed set of questions so the interviewer can explore the interest at the time (Newman, and Newman, 2017).

Weaknesses-

• It takes a lot of time as an interview can go in any direction
• There are more chances to get diverted from the interview
• This interview is not suitable for every candidate
• It can develop a negative opinion also about the organization
• There are a lot of risks saying during an interview about the confidential matters

M4 evaluate a job interview process and the obstacle and challenges to overcome

In an unstructured interview, there are no prearranged questions so interviewer doesn’t know that how much time it is going to take. It is necessary to decide a time limit for this type of interviews. This interview process sets an image of the organization in front of the applicant so it is necessary for the interviewer to maintain the dignity of organization and do not ask any personal or inappropriate question to the candidate. Otherwise, this will be not good for the organization’s image and the candidate will also lose his interest in the interview. There should be no partiality for any candidate this will have a bad impact on other candidates. Here are some main challenges and obstacles that need to be overcome-

• Partiality in interview
• Long-time duration of the interview
• Complexity in comparing data (Northouse, 2018)

D3 Produce a detailed and coherent critical reflection of an interview process and own abilities during this process

These unstructured interviews are tending to be free-flowing and more information rather than a structured interview process. It is just like a conversation happens every day. It permits and analyzes the spontaneity of interviewer and as well as a candidate too and the question that interviewer create during the interview that is based on the response of applicant. The main feature of the unstructured interview is the concept of probe questions that are created to be as open as possible. It is also known as a method of qualitative research and as per the validity of priorities and answer’s depth (Raab, et.al., 2016).

Conclusion

In this assessment, personal and professional development plan helps the employees to learn the things that how they work in different ways or how they respond to different things in this economy that is knowledge-based. Products of the Tesco are now much knowledge-intensive progressively and for these, employers are accountable for giving the opportunities for consistent learning. To deal with the competitiveness and challenges in the retail sector, each organization needs to hire skilled employees for completing the activities in an appropriate way so training program and personal & professional development plan help the organization to assess their skills, competencies, and knowledge within the organization.  

References

• Allmendinger, P., 2017.  Planning theory. Macmillan International Higher Education.
• Bates, M.S., Phalen, L. and Moran, C., 2016. Online professional development: A primer.  Phi Delta Kappan,  97(5), pp.70-73.
• Cottrell, S., 2015.  Skills for success: Personal development and employability. Macmillan International Higher Education.
• Ellinger, A.E. and Ellinger, A.D., 2014. Leveraging human resource development expertise to improve supply chain managers' skills and competencies.  European Journal of Training and Development,  38(1/2), pp.118-135.
• Haddock-Millar, J. and Rigby, C., 2015. Business Strategy and the Environment: Tesco PLC’s Declining Financial Performance and Underlying Issues.
• Kerzner, H. and Kerzner, H.R., 2017.  Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.
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• Phillips, J.J., 2012.  Return on investment in training and performance improvement programs. Routledge.
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• Robles, M.M., 2012. Executive perceptions of the top 10 soft skills needed in today’s workplace.  Business Communication Quarterly,  75(4), pp.453-465.
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